In September, Nathan Houser and Jon Eller visited the Library of
Congress and the new National Archives facility in College Park,
Maryland, to check sources and to search for missing letters and
original documents relating to Peirce's scientific writings from the
period (1887-1894) now under examination for vols. 6-10 of the
chronological edition.

Volume 6 will include one of Peirce's most interesting scientific
papers--his report on the ill-fated 1882-84 Arctic expedition of
Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely. The Greely expedition was dedicated to
science, and its goals included the establishment of an Arctic gravity
station based on Peirce's own pendulum research. Peirce, who was in
charge of gravity research for the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey,
established the procedures for the expedition's gravity operations
(which made use of a pendulum designed by Peirce), and personally
trained Lieutenant Greely and his assistant, Sergeant Israel, in the
complex technical aspects of this work.

The Peirce Project depends on specialists from many fields for help in
preparing our critical texts and editorial annotations. Although the
heaviest burden falls on our regular contributing editors and advisors,
we hope that through the newsletter we can significantly extend the
scope of communal involvement. If you can answer one of the questions,
or offer some guidance, please reply in writing or by e-mail to:

Replies should be directed to Nathan Houser
(General Editor) or Beth Eccles (Newsletter Editor). We would like to
thank Beverley Kent (Philosophy, Lakehead University) for identifying
the verse asked about in our last issue (Question 3). It is a stanza
from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Arsenal at Springfield." No one
as yet has supplied answers or information for Questions 1 and 2 in that
issue.

QUESTION 4. Robin MS 1562 contains two partial plays. One is Peirce's
1887 translation of part of the first act of Medea, a tragedy written by
the French playwright Ernest Legouve in 1856. The other (1562: 2Đ15),
perhaps also written around 1887, is an unidentified comedy. Although
Peirce may be the author, for the manuscript is in his hand, the fact
that there are none of the characteristic alterations and variant pages
of a working Peircean document, along with some other factors, raise
doubts about his authorship. The text is incomplete: there is no
beginning and there are some discontinuities. The following is a brief
summary of the plot and a transcription of the last lines of the
play.

Readers are invited to submit short descriptions (up to 250 words)
of research facilities or resources that support research that relates
to Peirce or his philosophy.

RESEARCH CENTER FOR LANGUAGE AND SEMIOTIC STUDIES Indiana
University, Bloomington

In the interest of extending its engagement in the teaching programs of
Indiana University and expanding its constituency, the Research Center
for Language and Semiotic Studies has proposed an additional track in
the Ph.D. Minor in Semiotics and provided an institutional base for two
other closely related Ph.D. minors.

With the expected approval of the Graduate School, two tracks will be
available to doctoral students toward fulfillment of the Ph.D. Minor in
Semiotics. In addition to the well-established general minor,
interested students will soon be able to pursue a minor program focused
on the Social Semiotics of Language, designed to draw together the many
offerings at Indiana University bearing on the semiotics of language in
society and culture, from poetics to conversational analysis to the
ethnography of communication.

Also, beginning in the Fall of 1994, the Center will be the
institutional base of operations for the Ph.D. minors in Performance
Studies and Cultural Studies. From its inception, Performance Studies
has had close relations with Semiotics at IU.

Hilary Putnam of Harvard University and Kenneth Laine Ketner of
Texas Tech University recently released a final report on the 1989
Sesquicentennial Congress. The Congress was host to approximately 500
scholars from 26 different countries and offered a remarkableand
nearly continuousselection of papers from the early morning of 6
September through the night of 9 September. Putnam and Ketner report
that the following eleven books have arisen directly from the Congress
sessions:

In this section we publish short descriptive notices of new books about
Peirce or subjects likely to interest our readers. We cannot survey all
new publications or prepare critical reviews, so we notice only those
books sent by authors and publishers. When available, we reprint
notices supplied with the books (often edited and supplemented with text
from prefaces or introductions); otherwise we prepare our own brief
announcements. Please note: we notice books only if they are sent as
review copies to be deposited in the Project library.

This is an introductory but scholarly treatment, in German, of Peirce's
work, viewed from a European perspective. Oehler focuses on Peirce's
pragmatism, theory of signs, categories and cosmology, and on his
significance for thought in the 21st century, after the decline of
ideological thinking. Oehler's thesis is that pragmatism will be the
Idealtypus of future philosophy, but Peirce's form of pragmatism,
not Rorty's.

From Time and Chance to Consciousness: Studies in the Metaphysics of
Charles Peirce. Edited with introduction by Edward C. Moore and
Richard S. Robin. Oxford and Providence: Berg Publishers, 1994. xii, 269
pp. $59.95 cloth.

Geraldine Brady (Chicago) reports that there is some confusion in
Peirce's final paragraph of sec. 2 in "Algebra of Logic" (1880: W4:
196-7). Specifically, Peirce misuses the law of association for triple
relatives and incorrectly infers A:B = . . . from A = A:A . . .
(bottom, p. 196). Brady suggests that when Peirce deleted the original
last paragraph from this section (see the textual note and the
emendation for 197.2-3, W4: 651, 652), he should have struck the second
from last as well.

Comments on Brady's analysis or on other matters of interest concerning
the Writings or the newsletter are welcome.

To reduce costs and save time we have combined issues 3 and 4 of the
newsletter. This economical measure will be taken again next year so
that volume 2 will appear in two 6-page issues and one combined 8-page
issue. When the Project's funding is on more solid footing and we are
better staffed, we will return to a regular quarterly format.

In the previous issue we featured some of
the exciting recent manuscript "finds" from the Hegeler-Carus mansion in
La Salle, Illinois. While searching through the Hegeler Institute's
Peirce-Carus materials, now housed at Southern Illinois University,
Project editors discovered, prepared in galley for the correspondence
section of the Open Court Magazine, a curious letter from Peirce to
Carus. That the letter had been typeset, with one set of proofs bearing
a note in Peirce's hand, clearly indicated that the piece was headed for
publication, yet no record of publication could be found.

A careful examination of the Peirce-Carus correspondence yielded the
explanation: Peirce had written to Carus on 9 April 1893, candidly and
emphatically expressing his views on certain elements of religion and
prayer (and on Carus!) that Carus found engaging. Carus copy-edited
Peirce's letter and had it set in type (without Peirce's knowledge),
expecting no doubt to debate Peirce in print on salient points. The
text, as it appeared in galley (except for one emendation), ran as
follows:

"I must tell you much of your homiletic writing for The Open
Court does not over well please me. It seems addressed to persons
who are supposed to hang upon your lips and take everything you say as
gospel truth. That is not quite philosophic, I must say. But what is
worse, your message to these, your faithful, draws upon their
credibility to an extent to which no clergyman I hear would dare to ask
his congregation to degrade their intellects, and still worse, it calls
upon their evil passions and excites them by blind prejudice and
bigotry.

As we reported in the first two issues of the newsletter, the Peirce
Project remains seriously underfunded and, as a consequence, is
seriously understaffed. At present levels of funding and staffing we
are only able to carry on part of the essential work necessary for
maintaining a vital research project and for producing books. We have
accomplished a great deal during the past year (a report on our
accomplishments for 1994 will be included in the next issue), but, until
the Project can hire production staff, no more volumes can be
published.

At present, most work at PEP is devoted to manuscript reorganization and
analysis, transcriptions, and basic editing functions. We are trying to
build a base of achievement that will support a predictable and
dependable publication rate once we are re-funded and adequately
staffed. The emphasis on manuscript organization and editing is very
important, but at our present level of staffing not much time is left
for well-planned fund raising, even though that too is essential for the
survival of the Edition. The need for a concerted fund raising effort
can hardly be overstated, given the budgetary anemia of Indiana
University and the Project's almost complete (and thus very vulnerable)
dependence on NEH as our single source for external funds. (It will be
three or four months before we know whether the Project will be
re-funded by NEH, but even if it is, it is likely that a substantial
portion of any award will be contingent on matching funds from other
external sources.)

In an 1880 note for Frederick C. Peirce's
genealogy of the Peirce family, James Mills Peirce (Charles' brother)
discussed the pronunciation of the family name:

"In the old pronunciation of the name, according to the tradition
prevalent in several branches of the family of John of Watertown [John
Pers, a weaver from Norwich who emigrated in 1637], the vowel-sound was
the same that we now hear in the words "pear," "heir" and
"their"; and this pronunciation is remembered by living persons
as having been sometimes used by old-fashioned people. This was
probably quite independent of the spelling. The same sound was,
according to A. J. Ellis, used in the verb to pierce, in the 17th
century, and by some in the 18th century. On the other hand, the verb
may be occasionally heard with the pronunciation "perce" (or
"purse"), which is now the prevalent pronunciation of all forms
of the surname in the neighborhood of Boston.

Unfortunately, the Greely party became iced-in and was stranded in
Lady Franklin Bay for three years. Most of the members of the party,
including Sergeant Israel, died of starvation or exposure. When the
party was rescued, it was a cause for great celebration, and Lieutenant
(soon to become General) Greely became a national hero. This created a
political atmosphere in which it was difficult to express anything but
the strongest praise for Greely's scientific contributions, even though
Peirce believed--at least initially--that some unreported accident had
damaged the pendulum used by the Greely party and that the resulting
data were therefore compromised. An "internal battle" ensued between
Peirce and Greely, moderated by various members of the Survey. After a
series of revisions, some initiated by Peirce and some dictated
to Peirce (and some possibly made even without his explicit approval),
his report on the Arctic gravity experiments was published in a
comprehensive federal report edited by Greely--but it has never been
clear exactly how Peirce's text reached its 'final' state.

Bureau files at the National Archives (where the files related to Greely's
Arctic report are stored) revealed new and important details, and proved
that at least one important set of revised galleys is missing.

Information uncovered in the Weather On the final afternoon of their
research visit to the Archives, Houser and Eller tried what seemed to
Archives Assistant, Marjorie Ciarlante, to be a long shot (even though
she stayed overtime to make sure that the appropriate boxes were
identified and delivered to the reading room), and examined 11 boxes of
Greely's private correspondence related to the Arctic expedition. There
were scores of original Arctic record books and thousands of letters
spanning many years and covering every aspect of the expedition--far too
much material to be thoroughly examined in the few hours left for
research. Nevertheless, the rapid examination that was undertaken turned
up five original letters from Peirce and 29 letters from Greely or
Peirce's colleagues at the Survey, all of which bear directly on
Peirce's gravity report. These letters, together with the other
materials in the Weather Bureau Archives, confirmed our speculations on
the chronological order of the five surviving forms of Peirce's text.
The letters in particular reveal a great deal about Peirce's revisions
for the missing galley stage, and will allow us to critically edit this
very important scientific report with a high degree of confidence.

The action takes place eight months after Emily Potter is
married to John Mildmay, a mild-mannered likable man generally thought
to be a little dull. The plot of the play centers around an attempt by
Captain Hawksley (who turns out to be a wanted felon named Boscawen) to
swindle Emily's father out of a substantial portion of the dowry still
owed to Mildmay. Eventually the swindle is avoided and Hawksley is
exposed by the unexpected wit of Mildmay. In the final action of the
play, Mildmay and Hawksley are apparently about to duel when Potter
calls the police. Gimlet, the policeman, recognizes Hawksley as a wanted
felon and takes him away. Here follow the final lines from the
manuscript:

[Gimlet]: A felon!

Potter: A felon in this house! Where? Police!

[Gimlet]: Sorry for it, Boscawen. But I've been wanting you a long
time.

Potter: Boscawen! This is Captain Hawksley!

Goes up left

Exeunt Capt Hawksley & Gimlet

Potter: I'm bewildered! What does this
mean?

Mildmay: Honesty is generally a match for plausible roguery in the long
run.

Potter: Jane, can you explain this? You're the only one that
ever can explain things in this house.

Jane: Henceforth for advice for guidance look there.

Potter: Why that's poor John Mildmay.

Jane: The master of this house.

Potter: John Mildmay the master of this house? Emily, my dear, has your
aunt been--I mean has your aunt lost her wits?

Emily: Ask pardon papa for the cruel injustice done him.

Potter: Oh certainly, if you desire it. John Mildmay, I ask
pardon--Jane & Emily say I ought; though what I've done or what there is
to ask pardon for [--]

[Mildmay]: Markham, you'll take Mrs. Sternhold.

Potter: My dear boy, you astonish me! But however there's an old
proverb that says All's not gold that glitters.

Please let us know if you can identify this play, or can supply
information on its connection with Peirce.

QUESTION 5. The following is a list of students who either studied with
Peirce in 1887-88 by correspondence or who expressed serious interest in
his correspondence course, "The Art of Reasoning." We would like to know
more about these men and women, especially whether any of Peirce's
letters or lessons have survived. If you can provide information about
these people or the whereabouts of their papers, we would be much
obliged. We would also like to know if there were other correspondence
students.

Likewise, there has been
substantial overlap in faculty participation and scholarly interest
between Semiotics and Cultural Studies, especially in regard to media
studies and popular culture. Drawing all three programs together under
one roof will extend faculty and student participation in the Center's
activities and strengthen our institutional presence at IU.

The Semiotics Research Centre, under the aegis of the Programme in
Semiotics at Victoria College, University of Toronto, will function
primarily as a research and production facility. Since semiotics is by
nature an interdisciplinary field of study, we will be dealing with the
fields of semiotics, culture studies, literary criticism, linguistics,
and cognitive science, just to name a few. It is our hope that in time
we will have not only an undergraduate programme in semiotics, but also
a graduate programme which will allow students to continue with their
research.

In terms of research, the Centre will not only conduct its
own studies, but also will serve as a contact database for researchers.
Lecturers will be invited by the Centre, in cooperation with other
departments at the University of Toronto and other organizations, to
speak at both open-attendance lectures and course-related lectures. An
annual symposium in semiotics in the form of the Georgetown round table
discussions is being planned.

Already, our production credits include: 1. Monograph Series of the
Toronto Semiotic Circle. This series is familiar to Peirce
scholars for its two editions of David Savan's introduction to Peirce's
semiotics.

2. Signifying Behavior. This new journal is
directed towards specialists from any discipline who are looking for a
forum to relate their own work on signifying behavior with that of
researchers from different fields.

3. Canadian Scholars' Press
Semiotics Series. This new series, which includes Introduction to
Semiotics by Marcel Danesi and Donato Santeramo, Messages and
Meanings by Marcel Danesi, and On Reading Eco (tentative
title) by Rocco Capozzi, is intended for use in the classroom, for
semiotic researchers, and for the general public that wishes to begin to
understand in a more detailed way how we shape our world and our
perception of reality. 4. Toronto Studies in Semiotics. A
University of Toronto Press series that includes Signs: An
Introduction to Semiotics by Thomas A. Sebeok, Cool: The Signs
and Meanings of Adolescence (forthcoming) by Marcel Danesi, and
New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Post Modern Thought
(forthcoming) by John Deely. This series publishes original work chosen
to promote interaction between research and theory in semiotics, the
communication sciences, and the cognitive sciences.

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH GROUP ON
ABDUCTIVE INFERENCE University of Frankfurt

In the last five decades there has been increasing interest among
members of the scientific community in nondeductive, pragmatic
reasoning, especially abductive inference, which Peirce called the
"first stage" of investigation, i.e., "inference to the best
explanation."

Disciplines such as philosophy of science, sociology, psychology,
linguistics, literary criticism, semiotics, and particularly artificial
intelligence have appealed to abductive inference to reformulate some of
their specific research problems. For scientists, and particularly for
semioticians, research on abductive inference provides a unique
opportunity for approaching interdisciplinarity under a single aspect.
In cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Semiotik (DGS)
we have set up at the University of Frankfurt an International
Research Group on Semiotics of Reasoning with Emphasis on Abductive
Inference.

The aim of this initiative is to establish a network of scholars who are
interested in abductive inference. We want to work out a bibliography
on abductive inference, provide a newsletter, and organize a workshop on
the interdisciplinary aspects of abductive inference. For further
information, contact Uwe Wirth, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat,
Institut fur Deutsche Sprache und Literatur II, Grafstrasse 76, 60054
Frankfurt, Germany. Fax: 069-798-8462. E-mail:
Wirth@informatik.uni_frankfurt.de.

Charles Peirce, sometimes said to be the finest philosopher the United
States has yet produced, was also a physicist, chemist, and
mathematician. He belongs to a long line of physical scientists
reaching from Aristotle to Einstein--including contemporaries such as
Planck, Schršdinger and Heisenberg--for whom physics was not enough, and
who went beyond physics to metaphysics and cosmology.

The seventeen papers contained in From Time and Chance to
Consciousness were first presented to the Harvard Congress
commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Peirce. They
are devoted primarily to the metaphysics on which Peirce based his
pragmatism. Problems with Peirce's metaphysics, involving both the
understanding of his position and the viability of it, persist. For
example, is Peirce's defense of First Philosophy sufficient to meet the
objections of W. Quine and others? Given scientific metaphysics as
Peirce understands it, how plausible is it to think that grafting
scholastic realism onto scientific realism will solve the problem of the
objectivity of science? Has the cognitive question of how we know real
generals been satisfactorily answered? It is also a fair question to
ask, especially in view of the importance Peirce places on science,
whether recent developments in science are in support of, neutral to, or
in opposition to the main thrust of his cosmogony.

These and other questions are considered, though not with a single
voice. That a varied community of inquirers has taken up the challenges
posed by Peirce's questions and answers may be read as a sign that
Peircean metaphysics is indeed alive and well.

This book is a comprehensive but manageable introduction to Peirce's
thought. Elegantly written in only 179 pages, it can hardly be expected
to give the unabridged Peirce, yet it is remarkable how complete its
picture is. By astutely selecting as Peirce's primary philosophical
project his Kant-inspired quest for the conditions of the possibility of
science (taken very broadly), Delaney zeroes in on the heart of Peirce's
philosophy. He elaborates Peirce's project as having two facets:
"first, the articulation of certain qualities of inquirers and
institutions necessary to sustain the process; and secondly, the
articulation or positing of certain features of our world necessary to
guarantee its objective validity." Science, Knowledge, and the
Mind is an account of Peirce's achievement in resolving the problem
he set for himself, a resolution that draws heavily from philosophy of
science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. The book is not
merely another introduction to Peirce's philosophy but is offered as an
antidote to current strains of anti-rationalism and anti-scientism.
Delaney believes that Peirce's brand of pragmatism provides a way to
transcend many of the limitations of twentieth-century philosophy
without rejecting its many genuine advances over past ways of
philosophizing. Delaney remarks that it is the task of every age to
undertake the speculative project of fashioning a synoptic conception of
the world and of our place in it. He shows that Peirce's try at this
perennial task is surprisingly relevant to current debates in the
philosophy of science and culture.

As Emerson describes it in his essay "Nature," the riddle that the
Sphinx puts to every great thinker concerns the relation between mind
and matter. In this introduction to the thought of Charles S. Peirce,
John K. Sheriff presents a philosopher who speaks to this fundamental
question of the nature of human existence. In clear and concise prose,
Sheriff describes Peirce's "theory of everything," a vision of cosmic
and human meaning that offers a positive alternative to popular
pessimistic and relativistic approaches to life and meaning. Aimed at
nonspecialists, this book does not attempt to evaluate every concept in
Peirce's philosophy but instead shows how Peirce's analyses of
aesthetics, ethics, logic, and human consciousness rest on the
foundations of his grand theory of the cosmos, mind, and signs. Sheriff
convincingly demonstrates that Peirce's answer to the riddle of the
Sphinx has the potential to be a powerful, positive force in
contemporary culture. Foreword by Nathan Houser.

Living Doubt: Essays concerning the Epistemology of Charles Sanders
Peirce

Although it is often said that Peirce is one of the most important North
American philosophers, the real extent of the philosophical importance
of his work begins to emerge only now. Whereas it was for a long time
philosophically fashionable to regard pragmatism as a typically naive
and simplistic American approach to the serious problems of philosophy,
there can be little doubt that recent epistemological literature points
to a reversal of that trend. Indeed, pragmatism, and more specifically,
Peirce's own brand of pragmaticism, a term which he invented in order to
distance himself from other forms of pragmatism, may well provide the
key to an epistemological theory which avoids the pitfalls of both
foundationalism and relativism.

The 26 papers included in Living
Doubt were presented to the Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial
International Congress held at Harvard University in the Fall of 1989.
They represent a rich and cosmopolitan variety of approaches to Peirce's
epistemology.

Semiotics and the
Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of
Charles S. Peirce

Dinda L. Gorlee. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994. 255 pp.

This book presents a radically interdisciplinary account of how Charles
S. Peirce's theory of signs can be made to interact meaningfully with
translation theory. Gorlee shows that the various phenomena we commonly
refer to as "translation" are different forms of "genuine" and
"degenerate" semiosis. Drawing on insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Walter Benjamin (and drawing analogies between their work and Peirce's)
it is argued that through the kaleidoscopic, evolutionary process of
unlimited translation, signs deploy their meaning-potentialities. This
enables Gorlee to throw novel light on Roman Jakobson's three kinds of
translation--intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation.
This pioneering study will entice translation specialists, semioticians,
and (language) philosophers into expanding their views upon translation
and, hopefully, into cooperative research projects.

Most of the essays collected in this book were presented at the Charles
S. Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress (Harvard University, September
1989). The volume is devoted to themes within Peirce's value theory and
offers a comprehensive view of less known aspects of his influential
philosophy, in particular Peirce's work on ethics and aesthetics.

The book is divided in four sections. Section 1 discusses the status of
ethics as a normative science and its relation with logic; some
applications are presented, e.g. in the field of bioethics. Section 2
investigates the specific position of Peircean aesthetics with regard to
classical American philosophy (especially Buchler), to Husserlian
phenomenology, and to European structuralism (Saussure, Jakobson).
Section 3 contains papers on internal aspects of Peirce's aesthetics and
its place in his thought. The final section presents applications of
Peirce's aesthetic theory and offers analyses of visual art (mainly
paintings), of literary texts and of musical meaning. The book includes
23 articles, a preface by K. L. Ketner, and a comprehensive introduction
by the Editor.

The artist/author has combined an understanding of media learned from
McLuhan, cybernetics learned from Bateson, and phenomenology/semiotics
learned from Peirce to conceptualize a range of projects reported on in
this book. The projects include a plan for an intentional video
community, an art of triadic behavior, the organization of a bioregional
magazine, a design for a television channel dedicated to the environment
using Peirce's sixty-six-fold sign classification, a computer program
for generating consensus using the sixty-six signs, an educational
curriculum and a notation for interpreting ecological systems. In
formulating these projects, the artist claims to have successfully
"abducted" the logic of triadic relationships Peirce tried to develop
but failed to produce. With reference to Murray Murphey's study of
Peirce, the artist/author offers his logic for scrutiny by Peirce's
scholars. The book presents 40 texts collected over 25 years in
chronological order with contextual explications. Preface by Roberta
Kevelson.

Van Driel argues that Peircean semiotics offers an alternative to the
object-immanent approach of structurally oriented film semiotics.
According to Peirce, meaning represents itself as a process, whereby a
sign is determined by an object and whereby the sign itself produces a
signified sign (the interpretant). For Peircean semiotics, research
into this process of meaning representation (the semiosis) is itself the
domain of research. Van Driel describes this semiosis by applying two
procedures derived from the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. The
first is Peirce's semiotic claim that all representation of meaning is
by sign. This claim constitutes the frame of this study. The second
procedure, which involves Peirce's theory of categories, functions as
Van Driel's leading principle.

Semiosis in general is described as a quality which may be actualized.
For this reason, semiosis in general is called semiosis 'in
potentia.' Van Driel refers to an actualized semiosis as
semiosis 'in actu.' This is the object of research of several
forms of applied semiotics. The description of this semiosis requires
an adaptation of the description of semiosis 'in potentia' because of
the peculiarity of the artifact (the sign) that influences semiosis 'in
actu.' In this study semiosis 'in actu,' and its specialized subset of
concluded semiosis (semiosis 'in lege'), is defined in terms of
the process of film analysis.

In presenting Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne as
members of a common and distinctively postmodern trajectory, this book
casts the thought of each of them in a new light. It also suggests a
new direction for the philosophical community as a whole, now that the
various forms of modern philosophy, and even the deconstructive form of
postmodern philosophy, are widely perceived to be dead-ends. This new
option offers the possibility that philosophy may recover its role as a
critic and guide within the more general culture. The five essays in
Constructive Postmodern Philosophy are presented with the hope that they
will contribute to a revitalization of philosophy in the coming decades
and to a better fulfillment by philosophers of the cultural role they
should play, and thereby, in some way, to a better world. Introduction
by D. R. Griffin.

"Take your article on "Idolatry," for example. No
enlightened person can fail to have a high esteem for true idolatry or
can fail to think the most narrow element of the Hebrew Scriptures is
the condemnation of it. Yet you seize on the word because there is a
blind, unintelligent prejudice against--one knows not what it is--but
whatever is called by that name. You use this word for that reason and
apply it to religions to which it is no way properly applicable. To do
this you produce a definition which would include your own and all
religious ideas. You don't reason about it. You just call on your
blind followers to hate.

"The essence of true religion involves catholicity. It must embrace in
its sympathy the Christian, the Boudist, the Jew, the Pagan,--every
discerner of God. The pest of religion is emphasising two penny ha'
penny differences. That is what you put all your strength
into.

"What you say about prayer is utterly unjustifiable. Tyndall
proposed a prayer-gauge. That was scientific. It recognised the
necessity of submitting to facts of observation. You, without any such
facts,--or rather with the whole host of them dead against you,--propose
to settle the question in the high priori fashion. Your
rationale of the matter would sound rather queer in a psychological
treatise.

"In some of our churches they use morning and evening the prayer of St.
John Chrysostom, as follows:
"Almighty God, who hast given us grace at
this time with one accord to make our common supplications unto Thee,
and dost promise that when two or three are gathered together in thy
name Thou wilt grant their requests, fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and
petitions of Thy servants as may be most expedient for them, granting us
in this world knowledge of Thy truth, and in the world to come life
everlasting."

This recognises that all prayer is for two things: in
this world, knowledge of divine things: in the world to come, life. It
also recognises that the supplicants have not attained as yet such
knowledge of divine things as may be attained in this world. It
therefore solemnly adopts the spirit of inquiry. But you, on the other
hand, have no need of this prayer, the summa of all prayers, because you
seem to be so sure of everything already.

"The idea that people are to pray for the sake of the reflex good it
does them, is an idea so odious to any healthy mind, that it is
infinitely better they cease all conscious prayer at once than practise
such damned affectation.

"I remember a gentleman from the rural districts,--though a real
gentlemen, a little gauche--who being presented to a lady at an evening
party where I was, stood silent some minutes and then turned away. The
introducer calling him to account, he said: "Well, I had no statement to
make to her, and she had no statement to make to me." This is just
about your notion of prayer. You have no information to impart to
Omniscience! If this is your only view of it, on all accounts, hold
your peace!

"The difference between the beliefs of a Newman and a Huxley is an
utterly trivial thing compared with the agreement in their real
religious belief. To make this common ground felt would be the best
service a philosopher could do for religion. C. S. P."

When Peirce
received the proof copy he was flattered, as he wrote in his reply, but
he declined to give his consent to publish. The following is Peirce's
reply (except for a deleted postscript):

"Milford Pa 1893 May 5
"My dear Carus:
"Your having the enclosed set up is very flattering; but I really cannot
consent to the publication of it.

"In the first place, it does not relate to any subject about which I
care to say I am competent to instruct the public.

"Second, it would convey to the general public & especially to an
inattentive reader a very false Idea indeed of my sentiments concerning
the Open Court & its management.

"Third, it is intolerably exaggerated, & though I indulge in such talk
to my friends--perhaps injudiciously,--I endeavor not to do so with the
general public.

"Fourth, its publication would involve me in the very fault I am
principally blaming, namely, a tendency to exaggerate differences.

"Oh no! The thing amused you, but I cannot indulge in such flippancy
before the public. We have our responsibilities which make us very
prosy and unnewspaperial.

"I have besides lately sent you two pieces
for the Open Court. One of them says pretty much the same as this
letter; and the other which I sent yesterday contains some valuable
matter,--almost worth keeping for the Monist.

"Yours very truly

CS Peirce"

The article Peirce referred to as saying "pretty much the same as this
letter" was "What is Christian Faith" (P 548). Carus did not agree; he
replied on 9 May 1893:

"I had a hearty laugh when reading your
letter, but I must confess that your objection to having your lines on
prayer published is a disappointment to me. The two articles in
which, as you state, you say pretty much the same, are not so plain as
you are in your letter, and I dislike very much indirect statements. I
would rather you would call me "a philosophical crank" directly than
that you speak in a general way about "cranks" of such and such a
nature. It always strikes me as a breach of etiquette in a true knight.
It amounts to striking an adversary without taking the
responsibility.

"I should add at the same time that all your critical remarks are
evidences that you do not know the aims of our work. After having seen
so much of our publications you should know better. You make
imputations especially on our conception of Religion, which are miles
off the mark."

The debate continued, privately, through the course of a few more
letters, but not much of substance was dealt with. Peirce countered (13
May): "I do not believe I so utterly mistake your aims as you say. I
think, on the contrary, that it is you who mistake criticism on special
sentiments, as being out of harmony with the tenor or your ideas, for
aspersions upon your purposes." Peirce adds: "I NEVER criticise
anybody's fundamental aims. If they are such as I do not approve, I
simply drop those persons." Carus, obviously stung by Peirce, wrote back
on 19 May acknowledging that the problematic letter should remain
unpublished: "Critique is always welcome to me, but there is no use of
replying to private letters which are 'habitually too exaggerated in
tone' as well as 'hastily written.' . . . Perhaps I am to be blamed that
I have taken your letter too seriously." On 23 May Peirce rebuts: "It
is plain you only wanted to print it because it was a particularly
private letter. . . . But the whole thing shows well what comes of
repudiating christian sentiments."

This episode, which did little to endear Peirce to Carus, well
illustrates Peirce's "difficult" character. Perhaps not surprisingly,
correspondence between Peirce and Carus broke off shortly afterwards and
didn't resume (except very briefly) until 1896 when Ernst Schroeder
insisted that Peirce was the only American who could review his
Logic.

(The Open Court collection is in the Special Collections of the Morris
Library at Southern Illinois University. We are grateful to the Hegeler
Institute and to David Koch for permission to quote from the Open Court
papers.)

Some of you have responded to
our fund raising appeals (or have sent books or other research
materials) and we are extremely grateful for your generosity (in the
next issue we will list our 1994 supporters). But the overall response
has been very weak and has not come close even to providing the
funds needed for any of the special projects mentioned in issues 1 and
2. This does not surprise our advisors at the Indiana University
Foundation, who tell us we cannot expect to raise much money with
low-key, non-personal appeals like this one. Perhaps so. But until we
can increase our production staff, so that I can devote more time to
fund raising, there really isn't much choice. Besides, readers of this
newsletter are surely not ordinary "prospects," persons who are more
easily influenced by emotional hooks than by clear and simple statements
of need. If you want the Edition to survive and can afford to help
support our work, please send a check today payable to the Peirce
Edition Project (account number 32-PO11-17-7). Send your gift directly
to the Project at the address given on page 2 (all gifts will be
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